Monitoring VMWare ESXi with the ELK Stack

Monitor anything; this is what fills your head after playing with Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana.

ELK Stack, meet VMWare Server. Since VMWare’s ESXi runs on some Linux kernel, it shares the logging facilities we’re familiar with on Linux systems. Going about forwarding syslog messages to a remote box is a bit different thou. Luckily, VMWare’s Knowledge Base is very thorough if you know where to look.

Enable SSH

This process needs to be done from the command line so ssh needs to be enabled on the server. This can be done from vSphere Client.